Civil Marriage Is Currently Defined Term Paper

The first route entails that the House and the Senate must each ratify the proposed Amendment by a two-thirds majority. Then the bill must be ratified by three-fourths of the states' legislatures within a reasonable time period. The second method would be for the creation of a Constitutional Convention to hear and propose the amendment to the states; this method also requires three-fourths of the state legislatures to approve the amendment. This second procedure has never before been used to amend the U.S. Constitution. In either case, however, it would take a number of years before the Amendment for Total Equality would become law. Furthermore, consitutional amendments are historically rare, and the proposals signficantly outnumbers the legal amendments. Several steps can be taken to ensure the timely implementation of this much-needed constitutional amendment.

Proponents of the proposed Amendment for Total Equality have a steep uphill battle to climb. The tide of the nation's moral and political philosophies currently supports a restriction of the rights of homosexuals. With a Republican majority in both houses of Congress as well as in the Executive branch of government, the Amendment for Total Equality will suffer major political blows. The main opponents of the Amendment for Total Equality include Christian groups whose lobbying force has become politically powerful in recent years.

However, proponents of the Amendment for Total Equality include civil rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which also constitutes a powerful lobbying force. Gay rights groups will generally support the Amendment for Total Equality, as will residents of states like Massachusetts that already ensure the rights of gays and lesbians to marry.

In order to gain a two-thirds vote in both senate and House, political support for the Amendment for Total Equality must be garnered. This support must also be grounded in already established laws that protect the rights of all citizens. If the Amendment for Total Equality is presented as an inevitablity rather than a rogue proposal, then politicians, lawmakers, and judges will be able to view it in light of previous constitutional amendments like XIII and XIX, which abolished slavery and gave women the right to vote, respectively. However, the Amendment for Total Equality best reflects the tenets already set forth in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States constitution, which reads in part: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Works Cited

The Constitution of the United States. U.S. Constitution Online. http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Article5.

Federal Marriage Amendment." Wikipedia. 4 Dec 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Marriage_Amendment.

Longley, Robert (2004). "Federal Marriage Amendment H.J. Res 56." About.com. http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/usconstitution/a/marriage.htm.

Mount, Steve (2003). "Constitutional Amendments." U.S. Constitution Online. http://www.usconstitution.net/constam.html#process.